Bag of Randomness for Friday, August 23, 2019

  • I’m upset with myself at how I can turn a simple task difficult. We need a new can opener. Instead of simply going to the store and picking one up the shelf, I decided to search Amazon and then compare the top-selling models with several online rankings. I then remembered the can opener in my childhood home was electric and had a knife sharpener in the back, so I decided to see if one of those is available. They are, but I can’t find one which performs one of those smooth cuts.
  • In defense of reading the same book over and over againWhy we revisit old favorites — like Harry Potter — so often.
    • I don’t think I’ve read any book more than once, maybe a short story, but not a book.
  • New $53M Texas high school football stadium has state’s largest video boardThe latest cathedral to pigskin is the new $50+ million Children’s Health Stadium, which will host Prosper (Texas) High School. Prosper is a northern suburb of Dallas.
    • Articles like this frustrate me. The headline mentions the stadium has the state’s largest video board, but I couldn’t find anything in the article which mentions the dimensions or specs or even a comparison to other video boards at other venues.
  • The World’s Greatest 100 Places In 2019, According To TIME
    • Only one Texas place is on the list, and it’s in Houston. The closest place on the list to Dallas is in Tulsa. And, two places on the list are in Vietnam.
  • For those of you who need a refresher with pig (swine) nomenclature:
    • Piglets: Any suckling pig
    • Gilt: A virgin female pig
    • Shoat: A juvenile male pig
    • Hog: A domestic pig that weighs more than 120 lbs.
    • Boar: Any male pig that’s not a piglet (an uncastrated male domestic pig)
    • Barrow: Male pig castrated at an early age
    • Sow: Mature female pig
    • Stag: Male pig castrated at a later age
    • Drift: A herd of domestic pigs
    • Sounder: Not used here, but it’s a group of wild pigs
    • Farrow: A group of piglets
    • And for good measure: – Feral pigs and wild hogs are similar and may even be indistinguishable in some cases, but they not one in the same. The key difference in defining a specific one is the use of the terms “feral” and “wild,” which have two distinct meanings.
      • The term “feral” applies to any animal that was once domesticated or whose ancestors were domesticated but has since been loosed into the wild and lost its sense of domestication. Feral pigs, often referred to ambiguously as “razorbacks” in many countries around the world regardless of the actual species of the pig, either were domestic pigs themselves or they are the descendants of domestic pigs.
      • Wild hogs collectively have never been subject to domestication by humans and have always remained as they were originally, wild.
  • Nike has a new shoe which comes with a removable gaiter shell which kinda makes the shoe a boot. I guess this stuff will sell better in places like Chicago and Seattle.
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5 Responses to Bag of Randomness for Friday, August 23, 2019

  1. Ben W. says:

    The only book I’ve consistently read multiple times is To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s powerful and resonates with me in a way no other book has. I’ve read other books a couple of times, but that’s the one that I keep coming back to.

    • Kathy says:

      I love your comment–and the book. I had the pleasure of teaching it to students for several years. Love it!

  2. Bizarro Big Tex says:

    I am now going to attempt to include the word “shoat” in my daily conversations at least once a day. Just for fun & the look on my friends’ faces.

  3. Bryan B. says:

    Best can opener I’ve ever owned:

    https://www.pamperedchef.com/shop/Cooking+Tools/Can+%26+Jar+Openers/Smooth-Edge+Can+Opener/2759

    We wore one out a few years ago and had to buy a new one.

    I’ve read a few books more than once, most notably The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway. I did my junior English project on it in high school and I’ve gone back and read it a few times as an adult. It’s far and away my favorite novel because it has a little of everything: a boozy road trip across Europe, fly fishing, running with the bulls, bull fighting, unrequited love, and the whole thing ends with a trip to the beach.

    The part that frustrates me about the football stadium article is that a school district spent that kind of money to build a football stadium when they’re probably barely scraping by in other areas. I know this is Texas where football is king and I don’t want to be the old man yelling at the clouds, but back before I was in high school and watched football on Friday nights, we sat on wood bleachers covered in lead based paint and we liked it. I digress.

    The Time magazine list has 2 Texas items: the aforementioned Indigo in Houston and Ruby City in San Antonio. When you said that Tulsa made the list, I knew it had to be The Gathering Place. It looks incredible.

    • Bizarro Big Tex says:

      Bryan, you just took me down memory lane. My cousin as a toddler chewing on the lead-base paint bleachers and occasionally falling through the stand to the ground below, only to be retrieved by my aunt and do it all over again later. And eating hotdogs provided by the local processing plant and made from mystery meat parts of unspecified animals. And older bald men with large bulging beer bellies who spit their snuff throughout the game and yelled “pi**ants!!!” at the opposing players. I LOVED Friday night football as an observer until I was old enough to participate. Good times!

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